At least, they did, until her recent promotion to the C-Suite. Caroline recognized after some recent 360 feedback that whilst people respected her technical expertise as an engineer, her leadership of individuals and the team needed improvement. It wasn’t terrible, indeed her 360 scores were among the better results across her peers. But Caroline...
Change of all varieties (especially organisational transformation) rarely gets completed and sustained in the way we might hope and plan for. Experiencing that divergence between the plan and reality, or even failing to deliver the impacts you wanted, can feel terrible and disabling, leading to dents in confidence, increased risk aversion and ultimately shying...
The curious leader has an insatiable interest in new people, new things and new experiences. They have constantly active minds as one fresh insight leads to another, which leads to the desire for yet further discovery. They pursue this interest for personal growth with a view to uncovering fresh insights and new ideas that...
To paraphrase Herbert Yardley, ‘once the money is in the pot it is no longer yours.’ The investment you have made is history and you just need to focus on what you will do next, based on the best information you have to hand and your understanding of the wider context in which you...
Exhausted. The most common response I get to an opening question I pose senior leaders that I have the chance to speak with most days of the week. Change and uncertainty: The two most common responses to my follow-up question about the root causes of that exhaustion. I appreciate their openness about their feelings....
Organisations are constantly in motion. Expanding and shrinking. Accelerating and slowing down. Pursuing and following. A business represents a fluid system that exerts and reacts to forces both internal and external, known and unknown. The better equipped organisations are to cope with their dynamic nature the quicker and faster they can move forward. This...
As many businesses continue to wrestle with the “if“ and/or “how” of whether employees should head back to working on-site, there seems to be an opportunity here for those same organisations to consider their role on a societal scale. Since early Summer 2020, we have been challenging individual leaders and their organisations, to consider...
It makes sense that leaders and managers impact the productivity and engagement of those in their teams. Both negatively and positively. In fact, isn’t positively affecting these two measures, at least partly, what leaders are rewarded for? But wellbeing? You can hear leaders and managers everywhere, as one voice claim, “That’s not in my...
Whilst total production fell in the UK through 2020 due to the effects of the pandemic, average productivity increased marginally on hourly output measures, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Perhaps neither of these figures are wholly surprising, given the vastly different types of jobs done by people all across the UK....
It seems to us that as we look around politics and business life, there is a real dearth of great leadership. But what do we mean when we say “great leadership”? In Exigence’s view, a ‘great’ leader should not be confused with either a famous (or infamous) leader. Leaders can achieve notoriety for all...
